Facebook pixel

We all know the importance of social media in both our personal and our professional lives. They not only changed the way we communicate and live our lives, but also the way we do our business. They are a mandatory part of our daily life – through them we inform ourselves, we communicate, we grow and develop ourselves and our businesses. Life is impossible without an online presence. The same goes here - without the proper online presence, we cannot have a successful business. It’s that simple.

Of course, this is mainly true for Facebook. While it was becoming our go-to place for fun, consolation and relaxation, it has also become a major part of online marketing.

Facebook is one of the most important traffic and sales sources for your website. It shortens the distance between a business and a customer quickly and effectively. How does this happen? With the help of Facebook Pixel.

What is Facebook Pixel?

Facebook Pixel is a universal code, placed on our website. You get the code from your Facebook Ads Manager and with its help you can track every user who has visited your website, and his behavior there. It is called a pixel because it is a 1×1 pixel image that is not visible to the user.

Not only are your ads more precise and well-targeted, but you will also gain a better understanding on their performance. The pixel allows you to make your messaging much more effective, leading to a better return on your investment.

The Facebook Pixel can be used for three main functions:

Building Custom Audiences from your website for retargeting;

Optimizing ads for conversions;

Tracking conversions and attributing them back to your ads.

How does it work?

Website Custom Audiences - how Facebook helps you retarget your website visitors. After you have installed your Facebook pixel, it will start tracking the movements on any visitors logged simultaneously on Facebook. It will record which pages on your website are visited, which are not, when are they visited and what’s the user’s behavior on them. Using this data, you will be able to advertise better to only targeted groups of people.

Disclaimer: Facebook doesn’t let you choose a specific individual and advertise to him/her. Instead, it combines people into a specific group based on a common and shared behavior/interest or else. For example – people who have visited your website in the past 24 hours; users who have visited your website in the past 180 days, but not in the past 30 days; users who have visited a specific page on your website and so on.

These groups of people are called audiences. You can create your own (custom audiences) and you can choose what would be the common denominator. Once an audience is created, you can choose when and to which add to use it. You can save up audiences for future use.

Custom Conversions – Facebook (and subsequently you do too) knows who have clicked on the ad and converted thanks to the Facebook pixel. Facebook ad engine can auto optimize the ad to be only shown to the people who are likely to convert! And this is important! This changes the game entirely.

This is how it works: Facebook will do a mega split test, meaning it will show the ad to 100 people with a set of similarities and check how many people convert. Then it will show the ad to another set of 100 people with similar characteristics and check the conversion. Once it understands what type of audience is more likely to convert, it will show the ad only to those people.

So you can target a very broad audience and let Facebook optimize the ad for you and narrow your targeting.

Standard events

The event is something that happened on our website, thanks to which we can get accurate information about what users actually do there. It is the basis of the entire system behind Facebook pixels, as well as features such as (Facebook) remarketing, overall Facebook advertising, and so on. The standard events are 10 and are the most commonly used events to collect user behavior information. While custom conversions are tied to a URL (usually for some kind of thank you or completion page), standard events don't need to be. Instead, conversions can be tracked by adding an additional code to the page of interest.

There are ten types of conversions for which you can use standard events, each with their own line of code. This code be inserted only on the page where you want to track conversions.

Page view - The most basic Facebook pixel event. It tells us that the user has visited a page on our website.

View content - Here we understand what type of page has been visited. This can be a product page, a blog article, and more. In this way, we can derive more specific information from what this client really is interested in.

Search - Gives us information about visitors who have searched for something on our website.

Add to cart - Information about users who have added something to their cart.

Lead - Those who sent us a request. Obviously, once the user has sent us a request, he wants to buy from us and/or is interested.

Complete registration - Information about users who have registered.

Each of these actions can also set a series of parameters to provide additional and more specific information.

Lookalike audiences

You custom audience is not going to be very large (at least in the beginning). Facebook uses its own algorithm to come up with a list of people that is really similar to your clients/users. You can create a lookalike audience using information from the demographic and psychographic area (yeah, FB knows a lot about you). Through lookalike audiences, it will be much easier for us to reach new customers because they match to some extent the same characteristics (or have similar interests) to those of our customers. For example – you create a lookalike audience of people similar to the ones who have already liked your page. So you can also target them - the chance and they like your page is much bigger than in a random group of Facebook users.

How does Facebook Pixel Helps Your Business?

- The pixel monitors users and shows what they do (after clicking on our ad);

- The pixel shows targeted ads to a particular group of users (relative to their interests) that have a much better chance of conversion;

- It monitors and provides specific statistics on the costs we have incurred for advertising;

- It helps us easily find a new audience that we know will be interested in our product or service.

We now know that the pixel provides us with all the information needed to create the perfect and precisely targeted ad. In other words, using Facebook pixel, your ads will be only shown to people who want to see them and will most likely do the action you want - purchasing, engaging with your brand/products, and more.

The greater benefit here is that you can find out exactly which ad converts the best and which does not. And this can definitely save you big expense and increase your sales at a lower cost of advertising.

If you want to use Facebook as a channel to promote and increase the scope of your business, you also need Facebook pixel.

How to install a Facebook pixel?

Leave it to us! Tendrik's team includes professionals who will take on the technical and "boring" part of the process and will leave you with a functioning website ready to conquer the advertising world (or at least the Facebook one).

And if you decide you want to trust us with the whole conquering of Facebook too as an ad channel, you can do it here. Planning, building a comprehensive marketing concept is extremely important for every campaign and for marketing on social networks.